Wrath heroics were a joke at release in sub ilvl200. no cc was needed. boss mechanics could oftenjust be ignored. the only boss that consistently gave problems to this approach was the lightning disp. boss in one of the ulduar instances.

I was so gun shy about heroics after BC that I hardly ran the Wrath ones at the start. I did my initial gearing on the character I was playing as my main in Naxx 10 and just skipped the heroics.

"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"Almost every time I have gotten to know a critic personally, they keep up with the criticism but lose the venom." -- Ghostcrawler
I hate these casual Fridays ruining it for real Fridays.

I was so gun shy about heroics after BC that I hardly ran the Wrath ones at the start. I did my initial gearing on the character I was playing as my main in Naxx 10 and just skipped the heroics.

it was certainly a conscious design/tuning choice made at that time, particularly compared to 2.4 content. not sure any of it matters now in that context, but the posters who talk like they were hard on wotlk release (they weren't, I don't think mob melee dmg increased at all from tbc to wotlk heroics. ), or that tbc heroics were easy, do sometimes get a rise out of me. there was one guy a while back who claimed to have cleared all 14/15 tbc heroics in like 6 hours. anyone who played the game would just laugh at such a claim.

As others have said before, it's because Blizzard leaned towards the casual player in Wrath, only to make things hard again in Cata, and people didn't like it.
Had blizzard never implemented LFD, and would have kept forcing all players to do dungeons the old school way all along, they probably would have gotten away with the harder heroics in Cata. They learned the hard way that content can't be too difficult or full of a zillion mechanics in a game community where players no longer had to interact with eachother.

The shared raid lockout had something to do with it too, but to a lesser extent.

As others have said before, it's because Blizzard leaned towards the casual player in Wrath, only to make things hard again in Cata, and people didn't like it.
Had blizzard never implemented LFD, and would have kept forcing all players to do dungeons the old school way all along, they probably would have gotten away with the harder heroics in Cata. They learned the hard way that content can't be too difficult or full of a zillion mechanics in a game community where players no longer had to interact with eachother.

The shared raid lockout had something to do with it too, but to a lesser extent.

Had Blizzard not introduced LFD I think we would be talking massive losses in Wrath as well as Cata. Making dungeons hard was a massive mistake and I cannot figure out what they were thinking in doing so, it was clear in Wrath that people would drop the harder content. Halls of Reflection although not that difficult could be an absolute nightmare as you worked your way through a succession of players until you filled the group with players that were not only capable of but willing to complete the dungeon. They even had to introduce extra incentives for players running Oculus months after it had been nerfed to stop players dropping groups.

Had Blizzard not introduced LFD I think we would be talking massive losses in Wrath as well as Cata. Making dungeons hard was a massive mistake and I cannot figure out what they were thinking in doing so, it was clear in Wrath that people would drop the harder content. Halls of Reflection although not that difficult could be an absolute nightmare as you worked your way through a succession of players until you filled the group with players that were not only capable of but willing to complete the dungeon. They even had to introduce extra incentives for players running Oculus months after it had been nerfed to stop players dropping groups.

During TBC before WOTLK launch WOW reached over 10M subscribers, this were the people that were asking for harder 5man HC and normal Raids the guys that loved the "hard" stuff.

On Topic.

I see Cataclysm has a Failure when 4.1 hit, I quit till 4.2 because they nerffed everything and they ruin ZA.
Came back for Firelands witch was an awesome Raid only to get slaped in the face with more nerffs when my guild was 6/8 HC :X
5.3 was the last straw, LFR? Had to run it on main + 2 alts because the gear was better than HC Firelands :X did 3/8 HC the 2nd week of the patch and quit i still had to run LFR for upgrades for HC mode enrages I already see the last boss so many times and the boss machanics were boring :X only the ooze and shaman bosses were Ok i guess

Last edited by Etna; 2013-05-07 at 09:10 PM.

Bad - This is a bad player, he refuses to learn how to play correctly.
Casual - This is a player that will let everything else take priority over wow.
Hardcore - This is a player that is fine with putting things on hold while he's on wow.
Bad/Good - Measure of Skill.
Casual/Hardcore - Measure of Time

i actually thought the expansion started alright. i was actually excited for the expansion personally. i thought the events and quests leading up to its release were well done and the first time i flew into mt hyjal i was pretty impressed. after hyjal though the story seemed to start going all over the place.

i think they did a good job with the 1-60 zone and its something they get a lot of flak over but it was something that i think was needed. it is awfully linear now but i think new gamers want more of that and less of the "find and go seek" zones that implemented back in vanilla.

i stopped playing just short of the firelands raid coming out. i realized that the game wasnt really giving me any more enjoyment anymore. i actually enjoyed the initial difficulty of the dungeons but a lot of people didnt. i theorize that it was just too big of a shock for people as they had been accustomed to basically pulling half of a dungeon and aoe'ing it down in wotlk.

Tons of specs were viable in season 11 and season 9. Both jahmilli and novoz got glad on elemental and enhancement. Abni got glad as arcane and even the worst spec resto druid was played to glad range. Yeah shamans dominate the top .5% percent but the other 20 glad spots were up for grabs.

You're right except for 2 things.

1. My name is spelt "God" not "Loucious-sama".
2. I'm not a man, because man is inherently flawed. I am in fact a being so far beyond your comprehension that archaic constraints like flesh, blood, time and consequently, gender, have no meaning to me.

Ditto. Guild RP kept me playing Cata (and honestly, not even that was enough to keep me going for months at a time), LFR/HoT 5-mans got me back into endgame PvE... but MoP made me fall in love with the game again after Cata basically said 'Sorry, you can go sit in the 5-man Normal Mode corner.' for most of an expansion's lifetime.

LK was the beginning of the end for Wow. The superfast decline in sales can be directly attributed to Titan, and Team Deux coming in, half-way through and fubarrin' this game all to simithereens. Cata just made people realize there was no going back- Blizz was committed to under-funding Wow, living with the results, and generating new IPs/revenue steams. Mop and it's abysmal sales figures are directly attributable to LK, and how Cata was forced into a mould, and then all it's shortcomings.

Also another thing that ruined the overall the world in Cataclysm expansion is the amount of portals everywhere + mass summon give the players the feeling of the world is really small in the game overall.

LK was the beginning of the end for Wow. The superfast decline in sales can be directly attributed to Titan, and Team Deux coming in, half-way through and fubarrin' this game all to simithereens. Cata just made people realize there was no going back- Blizz was committed to under-funding Wow, living with the results, and generating new IPs/revenue steams. Mop and it's abysmal sales figures are directly attributable to LK, and how Cata was forced into a mould, and then all it's shortcomings.

Also another thing that ruined the overall the world in Cataclysm expansion is the amount of portals everywhere + mass summon give the players the feeling of the world is really small in the game overall.

Mass summon was a bit of a joke. Why go out clubbing when you can just summon the party into your room?
Why get out of bed when you can summon your girlfriend there with a bag of chips and an empty urine flask?

Mass summon was a bit of a joke. Why go out clubbing when you can just summon the party into your room?
Why get out of bed when you can summon your girlfriend there with a bag of chips and an empty urine flask?

Didn't like it? Shouldn't have used it!

Not to derail this into an "LFR thread" but I'm just saying this problem you had with Mass Summon is much like the problem with LFR to people who don't like it.

Not to derail this into an "LFR thread" but I'm just saying this problem you had with Mass Summon is much like the problem with LFR to people who don't like it.

The mass summon feature is different than LFR mate...the difference is that specially at the first week of Cataclysm..it was possible to even mass summon your entire raid grp even if they are inside the raid instance to use it to skip some trash mobs in BWD and such thing is indeed ruining the game play experience. LFr doesn't ruin the game play experience it's just another diffeculty of raid which being easy mode diffculty of our raids.

Cata just made the game boring. WOTLK did have it right; the reason the heroics were a joke was people outgeared the crap out of them, THE WAY CONTENT SHOULD BE. Yes they became AoE grindfests and you did need them to cap badges, the fact remains that once you overgeared it one heroic took about, 20 minutes? Roughly depending on which one you did. The Arthas stories also closed a chapter on WCIII lore much like Illidan did in BC; there's a reason those two xpacs are loved and it's because of the people who played WC, WCII and WCIII: We finally got closure on what happened in WCIII. Cataclysm was literally like.... oh okay. Deathwings back, someone who hasn't been around since WCII (which jesus if we're going by Warcraft logic was at least a decade ago) and while he was super badass in WCII, he wasn't unbeatable.

He was a regular dragon in WC2 and we killed him easily :P

And Cata heroics became 20 min AOE fests once you outgeared them as well. Before FL was even out they nerfed them and even when the nerfs came out they were already so easy that I remember wondering what the point of the nerfs was. It was the culture shock of going from doing dungeons in full ICC gear (which is what, 10 tiers above what they were tuned for?) to doing them in quest blues and greens, plain and simple.

Originally Posted by MAXCAVALERA

ARCHEOLOGY KILLED ME. i farmed farmed farmed and never got rewarded , i wanted that sword to help start raiding. stupidest profession ever.

You're doing it wrong. Arch isn't there for you to gear up. The epic drops were intentionally made super rare so that it would be a big deal if you ever got one.

LK was the beginning of the end for Wow. The superfast decline in sales can be directly attributed to Titan, and Team Deux coming in, half-way through and fubarrin' this game all to simithereens. Cata just made people realize there was no going back- Blizz was committed to under-funding Wow, living with the results, and generating new IPs/revenue steams. Mop and it's abysmal sales figures are directly attributable to LK, and how Cata was forced into a mould, and then all it's shortcomings.

I agree - the game hasn't been the same since they changed around developers behind the scenes. It's just that the effects of "Team Deux" took a while to bleed into the game.

Mass summon was a bit of a joke. Why go out clubbing when you can just summon the party into your room?
Why get out of bed when you can summon your girlfriend there with a bag of chips and an empty urine flask?

Pls implement IRL!

The weirdest thing was how it was tied to guild membership. Why did they feel the need to throw so many incentives at being in a guild when pretty much everyone was in one anyway? They have enormous advantages even without perks. I mean, my characters were always in max level guilds in Cata, but it just seemed silly.